The boats and ships out there, stuck in the open sea, a day from any shore, were sitting targets for bad weather. The storms came up fast and mean and could wipe out a whole fleet, devastating the community it came from. A village might send a few fishing boats out on a routine trip to Georges Bank and a few days later find itself a village of widows and orphans. The newspapers listed the dead men and their surviving dependents, too. This was perhaps the crux of the tragedy. It was imperative to count who was left, to estimate how many souls remained on shore without fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, uncles to support them. What was to become of them?
46 DEAD, the headline would read. 197 DEPENDENTS LEFT BEHIND.
That was the truly sad number. That was the number everyone needed to know.
Lobster fishing is not like this, though, and never was. It is dangerous enough, but it isn’t as deadly as deep-sea fishing. Not by a long shot. Lobster towns don’t lose men in battalions. Lobstermen fish alone, are rarely out of sight of shore, are generally home by early afternoon to eat pie and drink beer and sleep with their boots on the couch. Widows and orphans are not created in crowds. There are no unions of widows, no clutches of widows. Widows in lobster-fishing communities appear one at a time, through random accidents and freak drownings and strange fogs and storms that come and go without doing other havoc.
Such was the case of Mrs. Pommeroy, who, in 1976, was the only widow in Fort Niles; that is, the only fisherman’s widow. She was the only woman who had lost her man to the sea. What did this status afford her? Very little. The fact that her husband had been a drunk who fell overboard on a calm sunny day lessened the catastrophic dimensions of the event, and as the years went by her tragedy was by and large forgotten. Mrs. Pommeroy was something of a calm sunny day herself, and she was so lovely that people had difficulty remembering to pity her.
Besides, she had managed well without a husband to support her. She had survived without Ira Pommeroy, and did not show the world any signs of suffering from her loss. She had her big house, which had been built and paid for long before she was born and was constructed so solidly that it required little upkeep. Not that anyone cared about upkeep. She had her garden. She had her sisters, who were irritating but devoted. She had Ruth Thomas for daughterly companionship. She had her sons, who, though pretty much a pack of deadbeats, were no worse deadbeats than anyone else’s sons, and they did contribute to their mother’s support.
The Pommeroy boys who stayed on the island had small incomes, of course, because they could work only as sternmen on other people’s boats. The incomes were small because the Pommeroy boats and Pommeroy territory and Pommeroy fishing gear had all been lost at the death of their father. The other men on the island had bought everything up for a pittance, and it could never be recovered. Because of this, and because of their natural laziness, the Pommeroy boys had no future on Fort Niles. They couldn’t, once they were grown men, start to assemble a fishing business. They grew up knowing this, so it came as no surprise that a few of them had left the island for good. And why not? They had no future at home.
Fagan, the middle child, was the only Pommeroy son with ambitions. He was the only one with a goal in life, and he pursued it successfully. He was working on a squalid little potato farm in a remote, landlocked county of northern Maine. He had always wanted to get away from the ocean, and that’s what he had done. He had always wanted to be a farmer. No seagulls, no wind. He sent money home to his mother. He called her every few weeks to tell her how the potato crop was doing. He said he hoped to be the foreman of the farm someday. He bored her senseless, but she was proud of him for having a job, and she was happy to get the money he sent.
Conway and John and Chester Pommeroy had joined the military, and Conway (a Navy man all the way, as he liked to say, as though he were an admiral) was lucky enough to have caught the last year or so of action in the Vietnam War. He was a sailor on a river patrol boat in a nasty area of contention. He had two tours of duty in Vietnam. He passed the first without injury, though he sent boastful and crude letters to his mother explaining in explicit detail how many of his buddies had bought it and exactly what stupid mistakes those idiots had made that caused them to buy it. He also described for his mother what his buddies’ bodies looked like after they’d bought it, and assured her that he would never buy it because he was too smart for that shit.
In 1972, Conway, on his second tour of duty, nearly bought it himself, with a bullet near the spine, but he got fixed up after six months in an Army hospital. He married the widow of one of his idiot buddies who really did buy it back on the river patrol boat, and he moved to Connecticut. He used a walking stick to get around. He collected disability. Conway was fine. Conway was not a drain on his widowed mother.
John and Chester had joined the Army. John was sent to Germany, where he stayed on after his Army service was over. What a Pommeroy boy could do with himself in a European country was beyond the imagination of Ruth Thomas, but nobody heard from John, so everyone assumed he was fine. Chester did his time in the Army, moved to California, indulged in a lot of drugs, and took up with some weirdoes who considered themselves fortunetellers. They called themselves the Gypsy Bandoleer Bandits.
The Gypsy Bandoleer Bandits traveled around in an old school bus, making money by reading palms and tarot cards, though Ruth heard they really made their money by selling marijuana. Ruth was pretty interested in that part of the story. She’d never tried marijuana herself, but was interested in it. Chester came back to visit the island once—without his Gypsy Bandit brothers—when Ruth Thomas was home from school, and he tried to give her some of his famous spiritual advice. This was back in 1974. He was wasted.
“What kind of advice do you want?” Chester asked. “I can give you all kinds.” He ticked off the different kinds on his fingers. “I can give you advice about your job, advice about your love life, advice about what to do, special advice, or regular advice.”
“Do you have any pot?” Ruth asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Can I try it? I mean, do you sell it to people? I have money. I could buy some.”
“I know a card trick.”
“I don’t think so, Chester.”
“Yes, I do know a card trick.” He shoved a pack of cards in Ruth’s face and slurred, “Pig a card.”
She wouldn’t pick one.
“Pig a card!” shouted Chester Pommeroy, the Gypsy Bandoleer Bandit.
“Why should I?”
“Pig a fuggin’ card! Come on! I already planted the fuggin’ card, and I know it’s the three of hearts, so pig the fuggin’ card, will ya?”
She wouldn’t. He threw the deck at the wall.
She asked, “Can I please try some pot now?”
He scowled and waved her out of his face. He kicked a table and called her a stupid bitch. He had really turned into a freak, Ruth decided, so she stayed out of his way the rest of the week. That all happened when Ruth was sixteen, and it was the last time she saw Chester Pommeroy. She heard he had a bunch of children but wasn’t married to anybody. She never did get any of his marijuana.
With four of the Pommeroy boys off the island for good, that left three living at home. Webster Pommeroy, who was the oldest and smartest, was small, stunted, depressed, shy, and gifted only at plowing through the mudflats for artifacts for Senator Simon Addams’s future Museum of Natural History. Webster brought no income to his mother, but he didn’t cost much. He still wore the clothes of his childhood and barely ate a thing. Mrs. Pommeroy loved him the most and worried about him the most, and didn’t care that he made no contribution to the family, as long as he wasn’t spending day after day on the couch with a pillow over his head, sighing mournfully.
At the other end was the well-known idiot Robin Pommeroy, the youngest. At seventeen, he was married to Opal from town and father of the enormous baby Eddie. Robin worked as a sternman on Ruth’s father’s boat. Ruth’s father more or less hated Robin Pommeroy because the ki
d would not shut up all day. Since overcoming his speech defect, Robin had become a ceaseless motor mouth. And he wouldn’t talk just to Ruth’s father, who was the only one there. He would talk to himself, too, as well as the lobsters. He’d get on the radio during breaks and talk to all the other lobster boats. Whenever he saw another lobster boat cruising nearby, he’d grab the radio and say to the approaching skipper, “Don’t you look pretty, coming along?” Then he’d turn off the microphone and wait for a reply, which was usually along the lines of “Stuff it, kid.” Sadly, he’d ask Ruth’s father, “How come nobody ever tells us we look pretty coming along?”
Robin was always dropping things off the boat accidentally. He’d somehow let the gaff slide out of his hands, and then he’d run down the length of the boat to catch it. Too late. This didn’t happen every day; it happened almost every day. It was a real annoyance to Ruth’s father, who’d back the boat and try to catch up with the tool. Ruth’s father had taken to keeping spares of all his tools, just in case. Ruth suggested that he attach a small buoy to each tool so that at least it would float. She called this “Robin-proofing.”
Robin was tiresome, but Ruth’s father tolerated the kid because he was cheap, cheap, cheap. Robin accepted much less money than any other sternman. He had to accept less money, because nobody wanted to work with him. He was dumb and lazy, but he was strong enough to do the job, and Ruth’s father was saving a lot of money off Robin Pommeroy. He tolerated the kid because of the bottom line.
That left Timothy. Always the quietest, Timothy Pommeroy was never a bad child, and he grew up to be a pretty decent guy. He didn’t bother anybody. He looked like his father, with the heavy doorknob fists and the tight muscles and the black hair and squinty eyes. He worked on the boat of Len Thomas, Ruth Thomas’s uncle, and he was a good worker. Len Thomas was a windbag and a hothead, but Timothy quietly pulled up traps, counted lobsters, filled bait bags, and stood in the stern while the boat was moving, facing away from Len and keeping his thoughts to himself. It was a good arrangement for Len, who usually had trouble finding sternmen who’d put up with his legendary temper. He once came at a sternman with a wrench and knocked the kid out for the whole afternoon. But Timothy did not provoke Len’s anger. He made a pretty respectable living, Timothy did. He gave it all to his mother except the portion he used to buy his whiskey, which he drank, all by himself, every night, in his bedroom, with the door firmly closed.
All of which is to say that Mrs. Pommeroy’s many sons did not turn out to be a financial burden on her and, indeed, were kind enough to pass along some money. Everything considered, they’d turned out fine, except for Webster. Mrs. Pommeroy subsidized the money her sons passed her way by cutting hair.
She was good at cutting hair. She had a gift. She curled and colored the hair of women and seemed to have a natural instinct for shape, but she specialized, as it were, in men’s hair. She cut the hair of men who had previously had only three kinds of haircuts in their lives: haircuts from their mothers, haircuts from the Army, haircuts from their wives. These were men who had no interest in style, but they let Mrs. Pommeroy do frivolous things with their hair. They sat under her hand with pure vanity, enjoying the attention as much as any starlet.
The fact was, she could make a man look wonderful. Mrs. Pommeroy magically hid baldness, encouraged beards for the weak-chinned, thinned the wild brush of uncontrollable curls, and tamed the most headstrong cowlicks. She flattered and joked with each man, nudging him and teasing him as she worked his hair, and the flirtation immediately made the guy more attractive, brought color to the cheek and a shine to the eye. She could almost rescue men from true ugliness. She could even make Senator Simon and Angus Addams look respectable. When she was through with an old crank like Angus, even he would be blushing right up the back of his neck from the pleasure of her company. When she was through with a naturally good-looking man like Ruth’s father, he would be embarrassingly handsome, movie-matinee-idol handsome.
“Go hide,” she’d tell him. “Get on out of here, Stan. If you start walking around town looking like that, it’s your own fault if you get raped.”
Surprisingly, the ladies of Fort Niles didn’t mind letting Mrs. Pommeroy groom their husbands. Perhaps it was because the results were so nice. Perhaps it was because they wanted to help a widow, and this was the easy way to do it. Perhaps the women felt guilty around Mrs. Pommeroy for even having husbands, for having men who had thus far managed to avoid getting drunk and falling overboard. Or perhaps the women had come to loathe their husbands so much over the years that the thought of personally dragging their own fingers through the dirty hair of those stinking, greasy, shiftless fishermen was sickening. They’d just as soon let Mrs. Pommeroy do it, since she seemed to like it so much, and since it put their men in a good goddamn mood, for once.
So it was that when Ruth returned from visiting her mother in Concord, she went right to Mrs. Pommeroy’s house, and found her cutting the hair of the entire Russ Cobb family. Mrs. Pommeroy had all the Cobbs there: Mr. Russ Cobb, his wife, Ivy, and their youngest daughter, Florida, who was forty years old and still living with her parents.
They were a miserable family. Russ Cobb was almost eighty, but he still went out fishing every day. He’d always said he would fish as long as he could throw his leg over the boat. The previous winter, he’d lost half his right leg at the knee, amputated because of his diabetes, or “sugars,” as he called it, but he still went fishing every day, throwing what remained of that leg over the boat. His wife, Ivy, was a disappointed-looking woman who painted holly sprigs, candles, and Santa Claus faces on sand dollars and tried to sell them to her neighbors as Christmas ornaments. The Cobbs’ daughter, Florida, never said a word. She was devastatingly silent.
Mrs. Pommeroy had already set Ivy Cobb’s frothy white hair in curlers and was tending to Russ Cobb’s sideburns when Ruth came in.
“So thick!” Mrs. Pommeroy was telling Mr. Cobb. “Your hair is so thick, you look like Rock Hudson!”
“Cary Grant!” he bellowed.
“Cary Grant!” Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. “OK! You look like Cary Grant!”
Mrs. Cobb rolled her eyes. Ruth walked across the kitchen and kissed Mrs. Pommeroy on the cheek. Mrs. Pommeroy took her hand, held it for a long moment. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”
“Thank you.” Ruth felt she was home.
“Did you have a good time?”
“I had the worst week of my life.” Ruth meant to say this in a sarcastic, joking manner, but it accidentally came out of her mouth as the unadorned truth.
“There’s pie.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Did you see your father?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll be done here in a bit,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You take a seat, sweetheart.”
So Ruth took herself a seat, next to silent Florida Cobb, on a chair that had been painted that dreadful trap-buoy green. The kitchen table and the corner cupboard had also been painted that frightening green, so the whole kitchen matched terribly. Ruth watched Mrs. Pommeroy perform her usual magic on ugly Mr. Cobb. Her hands were constantly at work in his hair. Even when she wasn’t cutting, she was stroking his head, fingering his hair, patting him, tugging at his ears. He leaned his head back into her hands like a cat rubbing against a favorite person’s leg.
“Look how nice,” she murmured, like an encouraging lover. “Look how nice you look.”
She trimmed his sideburns and shaved his neck in arcs through foamy suds and wiped him down with a towel. She pressed her body against his back. She was as affectionate with Mr. Cobb as if he were the last person she would ever touch, as if his ugly skull was to be her final human contact on this earth. Mrs. Cobb, in her steel gray curlers, sat watching, her gray hands in her lap, her steel eyes on her husband’s ruined face.
“How are things, Mrs. Cobb?” Ruth asked.
“We got goddamn raccoons all over our goddamn yard,” Mrs. Cobb said, demonstrating
her remarkable trick of talking without moving her lips. When Ruth was a child, she used to lure Mrs. Cobb into conversation only to watch this trick. In truth, at the age of eighteen Ruth was luring her into conversation for the same reason.
“Sorry to hear that. Did you ever have trouble with raccoons before?”
“Never had them at all.”
Ruth stared at the woman’s mouth. It honestly didn’t budge. Incredible. “Is that right?” she asked.
“I’d like to shoot one.”
“Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Russ Cobb said. “Had them on Courne Haven, but not here.”
“Really? What happened? How did they get here?” Ruth asked, knowing exactly what he was about to say.
“They brought ’em over here.”
“Who did?”
“Courne Haven people! Threw some pregnant raccoons in a sack. Rowed ’em over. Middle of the night. Dumped ’em on our beach. Your great-uncle David Thomas saw it. Walking home from his girl’s house. Seen strangers on the beach. Seen ’em letting something out of a bag. Seen ’em row away. Few weeks later, raccoons everywhere. All over the goddamn place. Eating people’s chickens. Garbage. Everything.”
Of course, the story Ruth had heard from family members was that it was Johnny Pommeroy who had seen the strangers on the beach, right before he went off to get killed in Korea in 1954, but she let it slide.
“I had a pet baby raccoon when I was a little girl,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, smiling at the memory. “That raccoon bit my arm, come to think of it, and my father killed him. I think it was a him. I always called it a him, anyway.”
“When was that, Mrs. Pommeroy?” Ruth asked. “How long ago?”
Mrs. Pommeroy frowned and rubbed her thumbs deep into Mr. Cobb’s neck. He groaned, so happy. She said innocently, “Oh, I guess that was the early 1940s, Ruth. Goodness, I’m so old. The 1940s! Such a long time ago.”